When I write a book, I don't have a plan or an outline. The characters move the action, and the action develops the characters. When I write a book, I become an actor, really, taking the role of the person who is speaking or acting at the time, and so their reactions to whatever they see are my reactions.

I'd always assumed I was the central character in my own story, but now it occured to me I might in fact be only a minor character in someone else's.

Words have a life; without response they die.

A family is everybody all together.

When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?.

Me, what's that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa.

A map is the dead body of where you've been. A map is the unborn baby of where you're going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn't.